Separation Barrier

Separation Barrier

85% of the barrier's planned route runs through the West Bank, mainly in areas where there are Israeli settlements and industrial zones. By July 2012, construction of the barrier was 62% complete. It left some 3% of the West Bank territory cut off, west of the barrier. Completed as planned, the barrier will isolate an additional area of more than 6% of West Bank lands on the Israeli side. Construction of the barrier in the West Bank gravely violates the rights of Palestinians in the areas affected, restricting their access to their lands, crucial services and relatives on the other side of the barrier. The barrier also prevents any possibility of economic development.

Featured update

On 22 Jul. 2015 the HCJ okayed deportation of Nadia Abu al-Jamal and her 3 children from their E. J’alem home as punishment for an attack her husband perpetrated. The justices denied the petition filed by NGO HaMoked: Center for the Defence of the Individual on behalf of Abu al-Jamal. Deportation would not have been possible had not successive Israeli governments, with the approval of the HCJ, created an impossible reality in Jerusalem that forced Abu al-Jamal to live as a stranger in her husband’s home, in a spot not far from her childhood home. The two homes had been a part of the same community until Israel occupied the area and split it up.

Featured video

The town of Bir Nabala, next to Jerusalem, is trapped in an enclave of the Separation Barrier. A residential suburb of East Jerusalem since the 1970s, Bir Nabala enjoyed relative prosperity in the 1990s thanks to its central location and easy access to Ramallah and East Jerusalem, and from there to central Israel. Now isolated by the barrier, Bir Nabala lost half its residents, most of them East Jerusalemites who returned to the city, and many of the town’s businesses closed. Using unique archival footage, “Welcome to Bir Nabala” documents the transformation of Bir Nabala into a ghost town, via the stories of two local banquet halls.